An Extremely Trying Year

Jeez, you head out onto the field to soak up a little atmosphere after the Ohio State--Michigan game, the next thing you know you're in a British soccer riot. It occurred to me yet again, as I choked on pepper spray in the south end zone of Ohio Stadium three weeks ago, that adventure is where you find it.

I emerged from the Horseshoe unbloodied, which was not the case with all my 2002 adventures. I ate some serious loam at the Muddy Buddy Ride & Run outside Chicago in September, during which I hit a root on the bike course and went, as my father might say, "ass over bandbox." At least that spill elicited sympathy from my fellow racers. After a day covering the Calgary Stampede last July, I slaked my thirst at Ranchman's saloon, where some of the real cowboys convinced me that a ride on the mechanical bull was a good idea. I was promptly thrown, then roundly booed.

I stayed on my two-wheeled steed at the XTerra off-road triathlon in Half Moon Bay, Calif., in August, no thanks to eventual race winner Conrad Stolz, who came so close to me on the single-track that the handlebars of our mountain bikes clicked together. (He was on his second loop of the bike course, I was on my first.) To me that's the beauty of these XTerra events: You can rack your bike within a few feet of Conrad and Ned Overend and a bunch of other world-class athletes, and no one really knows or cares that you're a fraud, an over-the-hill 41-year-old with the VO2 max of a potted palm.

Other ordeals leave one no place to hide. I am thinking, in this particular case, of last May's 256-mile Appalachian Extreme Adventure Race (the AEAR) in western Maine, during which one squad in particular was exposed as a pretender. This was Team Marin, a trio of seemingly fit competitors who could not, alas, navigate their way from the elevator to the lobby of the Sunday River Inn, to which they retreated after withdrawing from the race in ignominy. Forty-one hours after embarking on the hiking leg that took the lead teams 12 hours to finish, the captain of Team Moron, as it had come to be known, used his emergency radio to make contact with race headquarters.

Our fitness, my chief concern going into the race (MURPHY'S LAW, May 27), turned out to be the least of our problems. My teammates--Gordon Wright and Teri Snyder--and I would have had difficulty navigating our way out of a gunnysack that weekend. We were lost early and often. We stunk, and we stunk.

For the first 24 hours of the race we were a middle-of-the-pack squad. That was as good as it got for Team Moron. Having misplotted Checkpoint 14, we spent our second night trudging vainly through Caribou Valley, a boggy, godforsaken concavity strewn with moose pies and at least five miles, it turned out, from where we belonged. In the morning we decided to proceed to Checkpoint 15. But we'd misplotted that one, too, and spent our last, miserable hours in the race scouring the west side of Saddleback Lake for another phantom checkpoint. (It was on the lake's east side.) By then none of us had eaten in about 20 hours. We were bickering, we were hallucinating, we were done.

When we finally radioed in, race director Tracyn Thayer alerted the state police, which had been informed that a search-and-rescue operation might soon be necessary. We were chastened, tired, hungry and, as I later overheard my brother Mark tell his wife, Sabrina, "oh-so-smelly--even the chick." Other than that, we were fine.

Mark was one third of our support crew, along with my sister Gibby and her husband, John Ries. Mark was sensitive to our embarrassment, waiting at least five minutes after our reunion before sharing his recently created nicknames for us: In addition to Team Moron, he'd coined Team Moses and the Israelites. Poor Dave McCallum, the volunteer who had spent a lonely night shivering and waiting for us in vain at Checkpoint 14, dubbed us Team S.S. Minnow, my personal favorite.

While five other teams failed to finish, none demonstrated such spectacular incompetence in doing so. Resolution for '03: Take a nav course or two, and return to Maine next May. Team Marin vows to finish the AEAR or, failing that, to get through the weekend with fewer nicknames.

The next SI ADVENTURE will appear in the Jan. 20 issue.

COLOR PHOTO: RON VESELY MUD AND GUTS The author slogged through many a misadventure in 2002.

For the first 24 hours of the race we were a middle-of-the-pack squad. THAT WAS AS GOOD AS IT GOT for Team Moron.